15 Child Care Marketing Ideas

Jun 19, 2014

Child care services are an integral part of every local community. Parents need reliable, affordable child care that will offer s safe learning environment for their children while they are at work. If parents don’t know about the services your business offers, then how will they know about the benefits you can offer their children?

Marketing is often avoided by child care facilities, but that just means you can gain an advantage in your community when you utilize this great ideas. It all begins with your environment. When you have a family friendly, educational environment that offers a full circle experience for children, you’ll have the foundation you need to market yourself effectively.

Great Child Care Marketing Ideas That Grow Your Business

1. Know Your Demographic
It’s your targeted parents and guardians that need to know about your child care services, not the entire community. Know your target demographic, understand what their needs are, and engage with them on their level. Working parents or single parents will likely have different needs than part-time or stay-at-home parents. Preschoolers have different needs than grade schoolers.

2. Get Free Publicity
A press release is a common method of gaining free publicity for your services as long as you’ve created something that is newsworthy. Don’t just send your PR to the local media sources, however, because a number of other publications could use your information. Unions, social service organizations, and even your local school district could be publishing a newsletter that would be perfect for your news.

3. Improve Your Visibility
Parents shop with their eyes more than they do their pocketbook, which means the attractiveness of your facilities is just as important as the programming that you provide. Give people a visual indicator of the value you provide in a glance, make your contact information be prominent in the display, and put it on any vehicles you use for your business as well.

4. Start Fundraising
You don’t have to run your child care center solely on tuition. Work on raising funds by being active within your community. Local fairs, phone calls, and even sponsorships are all ways that you can solicit additional funding that you may need. Even something as simple as a brochure with a money envelope is effective with some target demographics.

5. Take Advantage of Discounts
Many advertising outlets offer discounts for child care businesses that make using an ad a viable option to spread awareness of your business. Always ask about discounts in the initial contacts because many of these programs aren’t publicized.

6. Know Your Strengths
What you do well is what will make you stand out from the crowd. Take a look at what your child care center does very well and can be proven easily. These unique features will spark an interest in parents and help kids get to know and grow comfortable with the program that you offer.

7. What Are Your Goals?
The reason why many child care centers fail is because they are self-centered instead of child-centered. Are your goals designed primarily around profitability? Or are your goals designed first around the educational welfare of the children that you serve?

8. Be Dominant
What about your curriculum will help children be able to do great things? The dominance of your curriculum is what can give you a cutting edge. Focus on increasing cooperative behavior, health awareness, or encouraging skill development in some way to enhance your dominance.

9. Offer Individualized Fees
There are a lot of parents and guardians that would utilize your services if they knew that they could afford to do so. Most families will not contact you at all about child care if they feel like you’ll turn them down, especially when it comes to money. With a sliding scale of tuition offered, you’re giving people the chance to qualify for a rate that their budget really can afford.

10. Start a Referral Network
Parents who have multiple children of a similar age often find it difficult to find a babysitter when they need to get some time away. Create a referral network of babysitters that can help parents out in a pinch, talk to your staff about providing after hours services, and you can even connect babysitters in your community with parents in need for small fees that increase your profit margins.

11. Provide Valuable Information
Even the best of parents need a little expert help every now and then to create a successful learning environment. This is your chance to provide more value to local parents and guardians that can lead to higher levels of enrollment. You create expert advice on your blog or through pamphlets and brochures that help parents out of a problem and that will create value in the program you offer automatically.

12. Be a Missionary
People want to have their kids in places where relationships are trusted. That means you need to be proactive about getting to know the parents and guardians in your community. Take time to be a local missionary and speak at church gatherings, business events, or hold your own weekend seminar about the benefits of a quality child care service.

13. Establish Your Online Reputation
All of your offline activities to market yourself will be for naught if you have a terrible online reputation. It only takes a few negative reviews to create a poor online reputation, so encourage positive reviews of the experiences people have with your child care center to make your offline reputation sync up with your online reputation.

14. Offer Activities
Child care doesn’t have to be everything that you do. The program “Reading Rainbow” has been successful in teaching children first-hand through field trip opportunities that they put on film. Take the concept local and provide field trips in your center. Bring in gymnastics teachers for a day of tumbling. Dance teachers could teach ballet. Even puppeteers performing a puppet show can be an exciting time.

15. Offer a 1 Shot
Practical advice always has a marketing benefit, so offer local parents some short workshops that work on their time so they can work on their skills. Make it a niche workshop, like handling aggression, dealing with low self-esteem, or how to handle discipline problems for added value.

After being physically and mentally disabled by a brain tumor, Brandon overcame the odds to regain his health to help his pregnant wife in her fight against stage 3 breast cancer. A couple of years later he launched his blog. Today over 1 million business owners read his blog every month. Read Brandon's inspirational comeback story here.